“I’m a Teacher, I’m Gonna Always Protect You”: Understanding Black Educators’ Protection of Black Children
Abstract
Many Black educators in the United States demonstrate a political clarity about white supremacy and the racialized harm it cultivates in and out of schools. We highlight the perspectives of some of these educators and ask, (1) How do they articulate the need to protect Black children? and (2) What mechanisms of protection do they enact in their classrooms and schools? Through further elaborating the politicized caring framework, our analyses show how Black educators disrupt the racialized harm produced within schools to instead (re)position Black students as children worthy of protection via caring relationships, alternative discipline policies, and other interpersonal and institutional mechanisms. This study has implications for teaching, teacher education, and how the “work” of teachers is conceptualized and researched.
Introduction
The white1 supremacist foundations of American society (Baptiste, 2015; King, 2011) have always rendered Black children socially vulnerable to physical and psychological violence. This through line of vulnerability is repeatedly made visible in narratives by formerly enslaved persons like Frederick Douglass, in the horrific murder of Emmitt Till, and in each homegoing mural or t-shirt, hashtag (e.g., #SayHerName, #TonyRobinson), or viral video that concurrently humanizes and makes a spectacle of Black children’s lives and bodies. These vulnerabilities are the subject of national dialogues (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter) and urgent conversations among many Black adults about how to protect Black children. These conversations are grounded in Black adults’ embodied understandings of how white supremacy often dictates the psychosocial and physical safety of the Black body, especially of children2 (Kendi, 2016; Phillip, 2018).
Assaults on Black children, especially in schools (e.g., Vance County Middle School in North Carolina, Spring Valley High School in South Carolina, East Middle School or Success Academy in New York, Ozen High School in Texas), disturbingly document interpersonal and institutional racism in action, where adults who are charged with educating and supporting children are instead perpetrators of uncategorizable forms of violence against them. These assaults on Black children in their schools show how spaces presumedly designed to be “safe” for children and benign actions, like walking or talking, get quickly distorted into opportunities to use extreme or lethal force (e.g., Fantz et al., 2015; Greenwell, 2012). These highly publicized and lesser known assaults necessitate that we consider the questions, “What do we mean by ‘safe’?,”“Which spaces are ‘safe’?,” and “For whom is a place ‘safe’?”
Many Black educators3 in the United States, themselves once Black children and K–12 students, recognize this double-edged sword of “safety” and continually place themselves on the frontlines—discursively and physically—by denouncing the racialized harm and neglect Black children experience (e.g., Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999; Dixson, 2003; Walker, 1996). Racialized harm refers to the perpetual racism Black children encounter as their Black bodies get racially perceived and interacted with in their day-to-day lives in and out of school. A part of the legacy of these educators is a sociopolitical consciousness or political clarity (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019) about white supremacy and the violence it cultivates in and out of schools (e.g., Foster, 1990; Milner, 2006; Walker, 2009a, 2009b). This protection involves serving as active allies, advocates, or co-conspirators (Christens & Kirshner, 2011; Dixson, 2011; Love, 2019a, 2019b) alongside Black children, including enacting culturally and politically relevant pedagogies (e.g., Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999; Ladson-Billings, 2005).
As heartbreakingly demonstrated by the Black teacher in the Spring Valley video (Ford et al., 2015) or by Black educators whose actions problematically maintain the status quo, value “respectability” over the dignity of the child, and/or are rooted in cultural deficit, culture of poverty, or other racist internalizations, acts of protection are not the birthright of every Black educator. Similarly, there are non-Black educators who consciously and diligently enact means of protection for Black children. In focusing on a few educators among a cadre of Black educators across the United States who think and operate outside of white supremacist and assimilationist frameworks, our aim is to elucidate how they articulate the need to protect Black children and the practices they enact every day that reflect these concerns.
The empirical literature that documents Black educators and their distinct politicized relationships with Black students (e.g., Foster, 1990, 1998; Walker, 1996) is frequently retrospective and situated in the segregated South. This scholarship helpfully articulates strategies Black educators have used to ensure Black students’ success, yet there are few empirical examples of how 21st-century Black educators think about and attend to Black children’s racialized needs in the current racial context (Dumas & ross, 2016). This requires understanding why many Black educators intentionally enact protective stances towards Black students, and what this means for their work in schools. Here, we highlight the perspectives of Black educators who engage in this risky work of caring for and protecting Black children. To examine the contours of this work, we ask, (1) How do Black educators articulate the need to protect Black children? and (2) What mechanisms of protection do they enact in their classrooms and schools?
Our aim with this analysis is to further theorize 21st-century Black educators’ discourses of care and protection and to offer empirical accounts of this protection in action. In this article, we first contextualize this risky work as part of a broader literature that documents how race and racism attack Black childhood, the importance of positive interpersonal connections within schools for Black children, and the distinct, relational work of Black educators. We then articulate how the framework of politicized caring drives our analysis, emphasizing how protection (from physical, psychological, symbolic, to other interpersonal and institutionalized forms of racialized harm) is an undertheorized aspect of caring. In the Methods section we describe how interviews are used to draw out Black educators’ articulations of and mechanisms for protecting Black children and Black parents’ and students’ perceptions about them, and the importance of using observations to analyze how such acts of protection are enacted. Findings demonstrate that these Black educators consciously engage in creating caring relationships and safety nets to protect Black children from racialized harm. Finally we consider the implications of this study for teaching, teacher education, and how we conceptualize the “work” of teachers.
Literature Review
The Erasure of Black Childhood
Stereotypes about intellectual capacity, personalities, activities, and investment in education create a pervasive culture of suspicion and fear around Black children (Carter et al., 2014; Dumas, 2014; Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015). These stereotypes are palpable in the lowered expectations of teachers, implicit and explicit racial tracking in schools, disproportionate and harsher disciplinary practices (e.g., removal from class, suspension, expulsion) experienced by Black children, and variances in Black students’ perceptions of school climate and safety (Carter et al., 2014; Ferguson, 2000; Lacoe, 2013). Ferguson’s (2000) ethnographic study, Bad Boys, tellingly documented how such a culture of fear gets enacted via school discipline policies and practices that adultify and criminalize Black children’s actions.
This adultification and criminalization of Black children’s bodies and actions in schools perpetually deny them “any access to childhood humanity” (Dancy, 2014, p. 49). Such actions link today’s schooling practices to a legacy of anti-Black endeavors (e.g., human enslavement) in the United States that steal Black youth’s childhoods through “arbitrary authority, punishment, and separation” (King, 2011, p. xxi). Having an embodied understanding of what this continual denial of Black childhood means—that protections designed for and given to children are generally withheld from Black children—Black educators offer counternarratives to protect Black children. Moreover, they call out the racialized forms of harm Black children experience to argue that it is Black students who need protection (McKinney de Royston et al., 2017). This honoring of Black students as children acknowledges their vulnerabilities as such and the role adults can play as developmental partners. This literature suggests that Black adult-child partnerships in schools, in part, hinges upon this affirmation of Black children’s humanity and childhood by signaling to them that they are worthy of protection.
Perceptions of Safety and Teacher-Student Relationships
Honoring the humanity and childhood of Black children is imperative. They, like other children, are savvy observers and sense-makers of social dynamics and tensions. Children’s perceptions of safety—socially, emotionally, intellectually, physically, and otherwise—affect their well-being, learning, and academic performance (Astor et al., 2010; Devine & Cohen, 2007; Lacoe, 2013; Thapa et al., 2013). Lacoe’s (2013) longitudinal analysis of survey data from over 340,000 children in nearly 700 middle schools across New York City found that Black and Latinx students are “more likely to report feeling unsafe at school than white or Asian peers who attend the same schools and share the same classrooms” (p. 5), with these feelings being related to students’ perceptions about disparities in disciplinary fairness, school disorder, racial tension, and academic performance.
Thapa et al.’s (2013) review of school climate literature echoed these findings, noting that it is common for Black and Latinx students to not feel physically and emotionally safe in schools. Making explicit the link between students’ racialized perceptions of safety and interpersonal and institutional factors, they argue, “In schools without supportive norms, structures, and relationships, students are more likely to experience violence, peer victimization, and punitive disciplinary actions” (p. 360). Such research problematizes what safety means and the racialized tenor of safety, namely, who gets to feel safe and benefits from “safety measures in schools” like metal detectors, police officers, and zero-tolerance policies.
The Relational Work of Black Educators
Acknowledging the physical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, and relational aspects of safety is salient to understanding Black children’s racialized experiences in schools. Their experiences of racialized harm present a challenge to U.S. schools to facilitate the belonging and intellectual thriving of Black students (Williams et al., 2016). One critical source of insight should be Black educators, who have a legacy of intentionally fostering supportive, race-conscious relationships with Black children (Ginwright, 2010; McKinney de Royston et al., 2017; Milner & Tenore, 2010). For example, Black segregated schools (cf. Sowell, 1974; Walker, 1996, 2009a, 2009b) are rightfully lauded for their strong interpersonal mechanisms, such as teacher-student relationships (Foster, 1990, 1998; Lomotey, 1989, 2003; Tillman, 2004; Walker, 1996, 2000). Postdesegregation schools designed for Black children by Black educators have been found to have similar mechanisms (cf. Lee, 1992; Lomotey, 1992; McKinney de Royston, 2011; J. E. Morris, 1999). Supportive Black educator-student relationships have also been found in all-Black classrooms within racially heterogeneous school environments (e.g., McKinney de Royston et al., 2017) as well as between Black educators and Black students that interact within racially heterogeneous classrooms and schools (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2005; Milner, 2006)
This literature makes clear that Black educator–Black student relationships are historically and politically situated mechanisms of interpersonal care that support the well-being, academic achievement and long-term success of Black students (e.g., Anderson, 1988; Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999; Dixson, 2003; Foster, 1998; Irvine, 1989; Ladson-Billings, 2005; Tillman, 2004; Walker, 1996). This relational work is often rooted in Black educators’ clarity about the historical and political landscape they and their students work, worship, and otherwise live within daily. Such clarity guides Black educators’ intention to protect and defend the humanity of Black children and the “sense of urgency” to their relational work (Milner, 2006, p. 94). Moreover, this political clarity shapes Black educators’ understanding of racialized disparities and experiences in schools as having little or nothing to do with the inability or disinterest of individual or groups of Black children or families. Instead, they understand these as by-products of systemic racism in (e.g., the school to prison nexus; Meiners, 2011) and out of schools (e.g., intergenerational poverty, violence, stress, and lack of access to health care). Their relational work seeks to disrupt and counteract how race and racism get operationalized upon Black children’s bodies to signal to Black children their inherent and infinite capacity and goodness.
The relational work of Black educators is designed to support the well-being and success of Black students—such as holding high expectations for them—and serve these students in ways that go beyond those considered “typical” for teachers (Foster, 1990; Irvine & Fraser, 1998; Ladson-Billings, 1997; Ware, 2006). These latter efforts may include offering students clothing, food, or transportation; talking about students’ personal or home life; and supporting students’ positive self-images and/or challenging essentialized conceptions of Blackness, including culturally grounded examples in their lessons, and other practices that do not disentangle the pedagogical from the political and the personal (Milner & Tenore, 2010; ross et al., 2016). These enactments by Black educators’ counter the hidden curriculum4 (Giroux & Penna, 1979) in schools and work to protect Black children against the racialized trauma it can cause.
Theoretical Framework
To further understand how Black educators who work outside of white supremacist and assimilationist frameworks conceptualize the notion of protection and enact it to protect Black children from racialized harm, we draw upon the framework of politicized caring (McKinney de Royston et al., 2017). This framework was developed through studying Black educators who were concerned with the vulnerabilities of Black children and how they experience racialized neglect in schools. Politicized caring draws upon theories of caring in education, interpersonal and institutional care in Black learning spaces, culturally relevant teaching, and Black feminist thought. Below we explain how these theories inform this framework and how further developing it to include protection is useful for the present analysis.
In the United States, care and caring are viewed as important, if not necessary, elements of schools and education. Scholars have theorized how care and caring are tangible and intangible aspects of education that get communicated and enacted pedagogically and through specific teacher-student interactions (e.g., Noblit et al., 1995; Noddings, 1992, 2012) and are important for children’s learning and schooling experiences. Scholars have challenged color-evasive (i.e., perspectives that minimize or ignore issues of race and/or racism) theories that focus on ethics of care and caring relations with little or no attention to inequalities and power dynamics in schools, especially those experienced by racially minoritized children (Ladson-Billings, 1997; McKinney de Royston et al., 2017; Roberts, 2010; Valenzuela, 1999; Ware, 2006). A major critique of such approaches is that when they do not yield the desired effect, the “problem” is attributed to a minoritized student’s lack of motivation, grit (i.e., passion and perseverance to achieve long-term goals; Duckworth, 2016), or capacity rather than to structural, institutional, or cultural conditions of schools and schooling (García & Guerra, 2004; Love, 2019a, 2019b; Patterson et al., 2008; Valencia & Solórzano, 1997). This is despite successive studies showing that race is “central to what schools do and how they do it” (Patterson et al., 2008, p. 98) and that racism gets perpetuated through a lack of institutional and interpersonal care for Black children (McKinney de Royston et al., 2017; Roberts, 2010; Walker, 1996).
Valenzuela (1999) asked, “What does it mean to care about children from marginalized communities, given the political and social context in which education takes place?” (p. xvi). This question suggests that theories of care and caring cannot exist apart from historical and structural analyses of how schools are set up and how educators view their students and the world (Patterson et al., 2008). Indeed, scholars drawing upon Black feminist thought challenge the political and racial neutrality of education, pedagogy, and theories of care and instead acknowledge systemic forces as ongoing sources of everyday societal inequity and oppression (e.g., Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002; Collins, 1990; hooks, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 1997, 2005; McKinney de Royston et al., 2017; Walker, 1996; Ware, 2006). These scholars theorize how the caring, culturally and politically relevant approaches of Black educators reflect their awareness about Black children’s racialized lives and schooling experiences.
Bringing the aforementioned theories into contact with each other led to the development of the framework of politicized care and its four dimensions: political clarity, communal bonds, potential affirming, and developmentally appropriate. The dimensions are described in detail elsewhere (McKinney de Royston et al., 2017); here we focus on the dimension of political clarity and its relation to care or caring. Political clarity reflects an educator’s sociopolitical consciousness about the historical and institutional nature of oppression—from systemic acts of racialized violence to microaggressions—that frequently shape Black students’ lived experiences in and out of schools. Political clarity explains how a Black educator’s caring for Black children becomes politicized—that is, a politics gets enacted—through their social interaction with them precisely because those educators’ understand Black children as jeopardized and in need of care due to (1) the categorical nature of racial stereotypes (Carter et al., 2014; Milner, 2012) (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999) and (2) the complicated connections between interpersonal and structural forms of racism that limit the opportunities for Black children to survive and thrive educationally, emotionally, psychologically, and physically.
Linking political clarity with protection makes clear why and how Black educators’ adopt protective institutional and pedagogical stances toward safeguarding Black children from the by-products of systemic racism and white supremacy inside and outside of schools. Elaborating politicized caring to explicitly attend to the notion of protection expands caring beyond notions of nurturing to encompass strategic acts of shielding and defending Black children from racialized harm (physical, psychological symbolic, interpersonal, and institutionalized, and otherwise). Within schools, politicized caring has been depicted as involving conscious acts—verbal or otherwise—that nurture Black children. Adding in a lens of protection acknowledges how and when Black educators may also be repositioning Black students as children who are worthy of compassion and reclaiming Black childhood as a developmental period in the life course that is defined by the ability to play, make mistakes, and grow. These complementary conscious acts of nurturing and protecting counter the pervasive positioning of Black children as problems to reposition them as children made vulnerable by a school structure (and social order) that mislabels them as smaller versions of the adult monsters or criminals it presumes they will become. Protection means actively (re)positioning Black children as worthy of the expectations and opportunities of any child, and shielding students from racialized harms. Thus, a robust rendering of politicized caring links together the twin notions of nurturing and protecting.
Methods
The data presented in this article come from a larger study situated in Oakland, California,5 a city that has grappled with racially disparate experiences and outcomes for racially, economically, and linguistically minoritized students. In response, the school district developed a number of reforms and invited our research team to examine how initiatives relevant for Black students were understood and taken up in schools. Using an approach of community nomination by stakeholders (e.g., school administrators, teachers, families, school alumni) in the district, data collection was focused on “successful” schools that had large populations of Black student populations and where the sociopolitical contexts outside of schools was mentioned by multiple participants as affecting activities insides of schools. We chose this focus as unnuanced characterizations of “unsuccessful” schools are overrepresented and continue a troubling pattern of research, particularly on schools are run by Black educators and serve Black children, that Lightfoot (1986) admonished as engaging in a “search for pathology” (p. 11). Instead, we honor those schools stakeholders identified as “successful” and seek to complexify our understanding of the work of contemporary Black educators. We thus defined success based on an inclusive school climate for Black children as determined by cstakeholders and/or normative academic measures (e.g., Academic Performance Indicator scores). Several elementary, middle, and high schools and K–8 schools were recommended via community nominations6 (Foster, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1995) from district officials, parents, and community organizations. Based on their willingness to participate, seven sites were selected: two elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.
Study Design
The broader study sought to develop comparative case studies (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016) within and across focal schools to understand the pedagogical, relational, and institutional characteristics that supported the relative success of Black students. We focus on data from one elementary school, two middle schools, and one high school (see Table 1 for demographics at time of data collection). These sites were selected from the data corpus because we were able to gain the greatest degree of prolonged access to these schools and the educators and classrooms within them, as well as to stakeholders, like parents. This access afforded a more comprehensive data set compared to other sites. Each focal school was in a highly underserved area, and during data collection school community members referred to what was happening outside of each school as a way to talk about what needed to happen inside of it. These comments demonstrated a level of sociopolitical awareness emblematic of these sites that we discuss later. After preliminary analysis demonstrated some consistent characteristics across levels of schooling, we chose to foreground an elementary school, middle school, and a high school to show how Black educators’ conceptualizations and mechanisms of protection index an awareness about the needs of Black children from elementary to high school.
| School site | Ethnoracial demographics |
|---|---|
| Porter Elementary School (K–5): ~200 students | 66% African American |
| 25% Latino | |
| 5% Pacific Islander | |
| 2% Asian/Asian American | |
| 1% American Indian/Alaska Native | |
| 1% Two or more races | |
| Molly Williams Academy (6–8): ~200 students | 50% Latino |
| 46% African American | |
| 2% Pacific Islander | |
| 2% Asian/Asian American | |
| North Pineville Middle School (6–8): ~220 students | 81% African American |
| 10% Latino | |
| 8% Asian/Asian American | |
| 1% Two or more races | |
| Bay Prep High School (9–12): ~1850 students | 37% African American |
| 23% white | |
| 18% Latino | |
| 15% Asian/Asian American | |
| 5% Pacific Islander | |
| 2% Two or more races |
Our case is delimited at the level of the racialized notion of protection, as it is produced by Black teachers in this study and can be traced across those teachers and across the focal sites (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2018). The cases presented here illustrate how the concept of protection is an underexamined aspect of many Black educators’ politicized caring approach. In analyzing Black educators’ protective consciousness and acts, we highlight the multifaceted nature of politicized caring conceptually and empirically. Our analysis thus focuses on the following questions: (1) How do Black educators articulate the need to protect Black students? and (2) What are the mechanisms of protection these educators enact in their classrooms and in schools?
Data Sources
Data for this study consist of observations of classrooms and semistructured interviews with Black educators at the focal schools, which are supplemented with limited anecdotal evidence from interviews with Black parents and Black students (see Table 2).
| Data source | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semistructured interview with | ||||||
| School site | Sets of field notes | Student focus group | Focal student | Parent focus group | Teacher | Administrator |
| Porter Elementary School | N = 23 | N = 3 | N/A | N = 1 | N = 3 | N = 1 |
| Molly Williams Academy | N = 20 | N = 2 | N/A | N/A | N = 1 | N = 1 |
| North Pineville Middle School | N = 22 | N = 1a | N/A | N = 2a | N = 5 | N = 2 |
| Bay Prep High School | N = 24 | N = 1 | N = 9 | N = 1a | N = 8 | N = 7 |
a
Indicates interview with an individual rather than a focus group.
Observational Data
The observational data were collected from Spring 2014 to Spring 2015 at the four focal school sites. Researchers took ethnographic fieldnotes in classrooms and common areas, such as hallways, school cafeteria, recreational spaces inside and outside of the schools, and the main office. These observations describe the school contexts, learning settings, key participants, and in the case of classrooms, the structure and content of the class being observed (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011; Emerson et al., 1995; see Supplemental Appendix A, available in the online version of the journal). Researchers paid particular attention to pedagogical practices, such as the discourse or interactions related to student positioning and identity, discipline practices, teacher-student and student-student relationships, equity-focused practices, and quality of the academic content being taught (i.e., level of cognitive demand on students). Due to variation in school schedules and access, different numbers of observations were conducted across sites. Press articles, the district website, and each school’s website were used to understand the history of each school and its surrounding areas.
Interviews
Semistructured interviews were conducted with any parents, students, and educators at the focal schools who signed consent forms and were available for interviews. Parents were recruited via letters home and snowball sampling, while students were recruited in their classes, via recommendation by educators and parents, and snowball sampling. Although snowball sampling can identify potential participants that meet selection criteria and provide in-depth understandings, this method can produce bias by limiting the diverse perspectives generated by the resulting nonrandom sample (Penrod et al., 2003; Ritchie et al., 2014; Valerio et al., 2016). We tried to reduce bias by using other recruitment strategies (e.g., letters home to families), using references as links to identify potential participants, and documenting the referral chain to keep track of potential participants (Atkinson & Flint, 2001; Penrod et al., 2003; Ritchie et al., 2014).
To better understand students’ and parents’ experiences and perspectives on the school’s relative success, researchers conducted semistructured interviews that each lasted 45 to 60 minutes. A semistructured interview format allowed researchers to reorder questions based on participant responses and probe participants for clarity and/or elaboration (Åstedt-Kurki & Heikkinen, 1994; Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dearnley, 2005; Krauss et al., 2009; see Supplemental Appendices B–F, available in the online version of the journal). Individual interviews were conducted with students in Grades 6 to 12, and due to scheduling constraints a few focus groups were conducted. To facilitate participation and elicit young children’s experiences, researchers conducted focus groups with elementary students during the school day (Morgan et al., 2002; Ritchie et al., 2014).
Educators were recruited via (1) community nominations (Foster, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1995); (2) staff, grade level, or departmental meetings; and (3) recommendations from school administrators and other teachers. Since the larger study focused on schools where Black students were experiencing success academically and/or where there was a positive social and relational climate for Black students, community members often directed our team toward educators who met those similar criteria or supported the school’s success. This included administrators, counselors, coaches, instructional aides, teachers, security officers, and after-school staff. In this article, we focus on the voices of Black teachers and administrators who were interviewed at focal schools. Interviews were conducted individually, or in pairs when requested by teachers, lasting 45 to 60 minutes each.
Analysis Process
Our analysis began with open coding the data sources to document Black educators’ ideas about and acts of protection as they articulated or enacted them. This involved each individual research team member reading through interview transcripts and fieldnotes and identifying broad thematic areas. In discussing our respective themes, we discussed points of overlap and divergence in order to refine recurring themes into specific codes and subcodes. Codes were developed with the intent of reflecting the voices and sentiments of the educators in the study (Creswell & Poth, 2018; Miles et al., 2014; Saldaña, 2016; Saldaña & Omasta, 2018). The open coding of fieldnotes resulted in codes such as teacher-student communication and/or interactions, student-student communication and/or interactions, opportunities for engaging in discussion, academic rigor, attending to students’ everyday and lived experiences, or use of strategies to engage and support various learners. Likewise, from the interview data the codes that we developed included race/racialization, discipline, care, teacher-student relationships, and protection/safety. Through a process of refinement, these codes were discussed and analyzed for presence and prevalence within and across data sources and focal sites to capture similarities and differences as well as to hone the definition and scope of codes and subcodes themselves. Looking across the focal sites and sources of data (interviews and observations) led to deeper analysis into broad patterns and context or participant specific codes. Once codes were mutually agreed upon by the entire research team and our application of codes was calibrated, everyone engaged in coding the data corpus using the Dedoose® software. Simultaneously, subgroups of researchers (assigned to focal schools) explored the themes and patterns at each school. Within each subgroup, three to five researchers coded each set of fieldnotes, wrote analytic memos, and discussed codes prior to research group meetings (Maxwell, 2013; Saldaña & Omasta, 2018). This iterative and interactive process of refinement was accompanied by our going between the data and conceptual frameworks that could guide our analysis and capture the complexity and richness of the educators and school environments involved in the study (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011; Maxwell, 2013).
Across data sources, codes for protection and safe/safety often co-occurred with notions of caring, prompting further analysis into how these ideas were expressed within classrooms and in interviews with educators, parents, and classroom teachers. This analysis brought to the fore that during interviews Black educators across the focal sites nearly always linked notions of caring with protection and that they perceived racialized harm as a systemic issue that was manifested via acts of physical harm (e.g., police brutality) and symbolic harm (e.g., the reproduction of stereotypes). Interviews and fieldnotes were then reanalyzed to confirm the co-occurrence of caring and protection and establish if and how Black educators discussed or evoked these notions in their interviews discursively or pedagogically in their classrooms. To establish validity of our codes and preliminary analyses, member checks were conducted through presenting tentative findings to members of each school community. These initial analyses were further elaborated through additional data collection and engagement with the focal sites (e.g., volunteering and working at the schools, fostering school-university relationships) and ongoing discussions about the data (Creswell & Poth, 2018).
In this study we privilege the voices of Black educators in order to understand their conceptualizations of protection and the mechanisms of protection they enact. Our analyses here are thus based on the content and qualities of their articulations of protection in interviews and as documented through observation rather than on static frequencies of individual codes (e.g., teacher-student relationships, protection, positioning and identity, discipline practices) that cannot be understood outside of their context. Attempts at quantifying this type of qualitative phenomenon can obfuscate and overshadow the importance of understanding how phenomenon were communicated, experienced, or made sense of by participants. Quantifying qualitative experiences runs the risk of legitimizing frequency over situational significance. For example, it may matter differently or perhaps less if a Black teacher constantly repositions Black children as deserving of protection during a typical classroom lesson (thus resulting in a high frequency of acts of protection) but did not intervene on one of those children’s behalf when an issue arose between that child and another educator who made the child feel unsafe or wrongfully treated (a low-frequency occurrence of arguably important significance). In the next section we discuss the findings that came out of our situated analyses of Black educators’ articulations and actions.
Findings
This section is separated into two parts: The first analyzes interview data to show how present-day Black educators conceptualized protection as a central concern, how they articulated the forms of racialized harm from which Black children need protection, and how they identified their Black students as worthy of protection. The second section focuses on how these educators used or created institutional mechanisms of protection inside of their schools. We demonstrate, through analyzing classroom observations and interviews, how Black educators consciously recognize Black students as vulnerable and in need of protection in two ways: institutionally, through the structures they create, and interpersonally, through the ways they interact with them.
Conceptualizing Protection: An Awareness of Racialized Harm
Mr. Coles was a science teacher turned administrator at North Pineville Middle School (NPMS). During his interview, he responded to a question about how race was talked about at NPMS by pointing out the race-consciousness there and the need for it in schools:
You know, its [race] just embedded in the system [at NPMS]. . . . It’s in everything that we do. From the way we walk, to how we talk, it, it just is. I don’t know how to explain it. It [race] has to be recognized. For a teacher to say “I see everyone the same.” . . . you mean . . . you don’t see color? . . . that’s a problem cause everyone’s not the same.
Mr. Coles stressed the importance of a race consciousness by educators and identified a color-evasive pedagogical approach (i.e., “don’t see color) as a “problem” that needs to be addressed. Educators who take up color-evasive ideologies downplay or ignore the existence of race and see issues of race and racism as artifacts of the past (Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2011; Neville et al., 2005). In so doing, educators ignore students’ racialized identities and their sociopolitical realities. He also articulated that an awareness about race is “in everything we do” and struggled to pinpoint its exact manifestations because it is so ingrained that “it just is.” Implicit in Mr. Coles’s argument is a racialized awareness that the work of teaching occurs within a racialized context and that students have distinct sociopolitical realities as racialized persons, which teachers need to pay attention to in learning environments. In this view, teachers who employ a color-evasive pedagogy could reinscribe the racialized harm students experience outside of schools inside their classrooms. Color-evasiveness, therefore, is not only an impossibility but also a form of racialized harm.
Other teachers made similar connections to how it is problematic for teachers to ignore race and racism as they discussed their own racial positionality and subjectivity. Mr. Saunders, a middle school teacher at Molly Williams Academy (MWA), offered the following:
I always identify myself as a Black man, and I feel like because I do that, I feel like kids internalize that as well and see themselves as Black. I’ve also had instructors tell me that . . . “Oh, well we feel like, you know, kind of like the Martin Luther King philosophy like, you know, people are not judging me [the student] by the color of my skin, but more the content of my character.” You know, I would like to think . . . like that, [it] would be great if that was the case, but that’s not the case. I try to be as realistic as possible with my kids. Like you should be judged by the content of your character and you shouldn’t just have to look at yourself like a Black kid, but you know, society has another view.
Mr. Saunders highlighted color-evasiveness as missed opportunities for educators to preemptively acknowledge their subjectivity with their students and racially socialize Black students into what it means to be Black in the United States. He suggests that such perspectives are inappropriate in a society that “has another view” (i.e., one that essentialized Black children) and acknowledges the prevalence of deficit views of Black students and their families across schooling environments and the sociopolitical climate (Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2011; Kendi, 2016; Souto-Manning, 2019).
Earlier in his interview, Mr. Saunders articulated that both color-evasive perspectives and racist “views” have symbolic and physical consequences for contemporary Black children and that different forms of racialized harms are interrelated. After discussing the killing of Michael Brown7—a physical harm—Mr. Saunders goes on to talk about stereotypes within schools—a symbolic harm. He said, “Race and ethnicity . . . play out in the classroom . . . [and] a teacher’s bias can gravely affect a student’s achievement.” In connecting Michael Brown’s murder with teacher biases, Mr. Saunders suggested that a teacher’s failure to acknowledge race and racism ignores the reality that Black children may be subjected to physical harm at any time. Likewise, teachers’ failure to acknowledge the racialized realities and forms of oppression their students experience can reproduce symbolic harm through unchecked biases or stereotypes. Like Mr. Coles, Mr. Saunders alludes to the racialized harm Black children endure in today’s society and the potential color-evasive approaches have to further inflict harm.
Mr. Franklin, a teacher at Bay Prep High School, argues that recognizing that Black children may experience racialized harm is not enough—educators must also make Black students aware of this harm. Relaying a conversation he had with a Black male student about an incident in school, Mr. Franklin warned,
“What would’ve happened if I wasn’t the one that caught you [the student], if a cop caught you? . . . they’re looking for people like you. It’s open season on Black and Brown men, you know this. So if you had gotten caught . . . then it would’ve turned into a whole other thing, right?” So we kinda talked about that and he started coming to class.
Mr. Franklin underscores that his understanding of racialized harm was based upon his awareness of the systemic and racialized conditions that influence the lives of Black children and how their actions are perceived. His comments reflect a developmental awareness about the need to racially socialize Black children into understanding how their actions will be perceived and the potential consequences of those actions, even if he does not endorse those consequences. His recount of this conversation with his student reflects how he conceptualized the physical forms of racialized harm this student could not afford to ignore. It also demonstrates how he discursively positioned minoritized male youth’s need for physical and symbolic protection and his engagement in that work. In sharing how this student took up this race-conscious approach, he alluded to a potential link between race consciousness, a racially socializing approach, and students’ willingness to engage in school.
Other teachers’ interviews likewise reflect their understanding of Black students as children made vulnerable by the racialized conditions of a society by locating anti-Black racism as an indelible feature of the present, not a relic of the past. For instance, Ms. Bailey at NPMS noted how her school’s leadership was keenly aware of the racialized harm being done to Black communities by the penal system. Ms. Bailey referenced assembly topics that highlighted important social realities, like the school-to-prison pipeline (see Díaz, 2019; M. W. Morris, 2016; Winn, 2011), and praised the school leadership’s transparency in discussing these realities.
Ms. Bailey reflected on how systemically racialized conditions manifest within the lives of students and drew connections between racialized harm and her work as a teacher. She stated,
[Students are] dealing with [their] dad being locked up, and [their] mom is gone, and it’s hard. And if someone is not prepared to deal with that and have empathy for students who have to deal with that, you can’t teach in this kind of environment. So, the kids, my kids, come with so much trauma. Like for the second marking period [fall to winter], I was mentally drained. I would cry a lot, just having to call home and hear what students had to deal with at home, and then figuring out why him or her are short tempered or acting this way [sic]. You never know what these kids are coming with. It’s hard.
Ms. Bailey’s comments indicate her awareness of the conditions in which her predominately Black students lived and learned, as well as the trauma that may have been associated with these realities. Acknowledging the potential traumatization, Ms. Bailey offered a counternarrative (i.e., that there is nothing “wrong” with students themselves) and instead located the challenges in the situations students may have faced in their neighborhoods or homes. She also highlighted the potential impact of these situations on their engagement in school. This quote demonstrates Ms. Bailey’s care for her students, without students’ experiences or behaviors diminishing their potential in her eyes. She discussed why it is important to consider what is going on outside of school for her students, and how she used that information to “figure out” why they may be feeling or acting a certain way. Like many teachers in our study, Ms. Bailey’s care for her students is expressed by viewing them as worthy and in need of protection, emphasizing the need to be aware of students’ racialized realities, and advocating for educators to be intentional in addressing these realities in their work.
An administrator at Bay Prep High School similarly reflected upon what it means to be conscious about Black students’ lives. When asked what Bay Prep does well in relation to the Black students at her school, she responded,
Just being able to kinda understand where, what our kids come from, and what they need without being judgmental, or looking at them with pity. . . .They don’t want people to feel sorry for them. . . . And [we] just kinda give them the tools to deal with it.
In calling for educators to understand students’ realities outside of schools, she cautioned that “understanding” is not “being judgmental” or viewing students “with pity.” Like Ms. Bailey, this administrator evidenced a racialized awareness and care for who their students were and the racialized harm or trauma they experienced. They refuted societal critiques of Black children or families not valuing education or as being immoral, pathological, or intellectually inadequate. Rather, these educators analyzed the societal conditions and challenges their students grappled with outside of school and reflected on how to protect them from that racialized harm within schools without regarding the individual student with pity or contempt.
Teachers also argued that the lack of cultural alignment in schools perpetuated racialized harm. For example, when asked to identify “some of the primary challenges that Black students face at this school,” Mr. Saunders at MWA stated,
The basic challenges that Black students experience at every single school across the nation, the assimilation of having to curtail your own feelings and your own beliefs and your own way of life and kind of catering it toward a structure that isn’t necessarily befitting of the world you come from, you know? I feel like African American families have a different way of being able to show love and different ways of being able to show respect to each other that may not necessarily fit into a classroom. I feel like specifically when you’re dealing with the Caucasian teachers, who may have a very traditional way of teaching, even if it does include speaking and being able to pair share, or getting up and being able to move around, there [are] still certain structures within it that doesn’t necessarily fit with some African American boys and girls.
Mr. Saunders expressed that most schools do not share or value certain cultural norms and practices that may be common in Black students’ lives. This cultural mismatch may require some Black students to “curtail” or suppress their feelings and “way of life” in classrooms, resulting in limited opportunities at school to be who they are—asymbolic form of racialized harm.
In sum, Black educators articulated an awareness of the systemic, racialized structures and conditions, as well as the interpersonal interactions in and out of schools that facilitate physical and symbolic racialized harm for Black students. They used these understandings to guide their work in schools and disrupt how Black children have been cast as damaged and deficient.
Creating Protective Structures in Schools
Through analyzing how Black educators conceptualized the need to protect their students it became clear that they enacted that protection through pedagogical and school-level structures. Making students feel “safe,”“protected,”“cared for,” and “at home” emerged consistently as a key frame from educator interviews and discussions across sites. Below we examine how the pedagogical and institutional mechanisms of protection they created positioned students as worthy and in need of protection. We also explore how those structures fostered symbolically “safe” and protective school environments for Black students, and employed alternative disciplinary practices and positive positioning of students’ identities.
Creating a Symbolically Protective Environment
The race consciousness of the Black educators in this study influenced how they attended to their Black students’ socioemotional needs and sought to protect their well-being. Describing what it is like to be a Black student at Porter Elementary School, one administrator stated,
I think they find this place to be home. . . . I feel like they’re very comfortable here at Porter. First, it’s in their community, second, they see a lot people who look like them . . . I feel like all of them feel like, “Hey, I can come here and people care about me.” . . . I feel like the experience here is like you’re comin’ home, this is this my Porter family [emphasis added], this is my Porter home [emphasis added].
In presenting Porter as a familial environment for Black students, this administrator highlighted three symbolically protective and racialized features of Porter that can go unnoticed without careful attention to how race and racism operate in racialized harm. First, because the school is in their community, students likely had a degree of awareness about how to manage their physical location and the surrounding environment. Students may not have had this awareness in other schools or neighborhoods they were less familiar with, where they knew fewer people, or where they were less likely to be known within the surrounding community. As Trayvon Martin’s murder tragically evidences, Black children do not always have the privilege to not be known in a community or to operate in communities where the majority of the community do not “look like them.”
Second, the racial demographics of the school served as a symbolically protective feature where students saw “people who look like them” and may not have experienced the racialized harm of isolation, stereotyping, being a “representative” of the race, or being racially profiled (Haddix, 2012). Third, the administrator argued that students perceived that “people care about” them at Porter, a contrast with the lack of care Black students often experience in schools (Irvine & Fraser, 1998; McKinney de Royston et al., 2017). Later, the administrator indicated the importance of feeling comfortable (i.e., “at home”) while at school when he shared that former students, now middle and high schoolers, came back to visit and lamented that they had to leave Porter. His statements suggest the presence of symbolically protective features at Porter.
Ms. Bailey at NPMS described how she viewed her Black students as vulnerable and recognized their need for care and protection, and how that manifested in her pedagogy:
I feel like there are some really good things in this space, and [students] really try to live up to the expectations that we have of them. . . . I feel like when I am in front of them, my hope and desire is for them to know that they are cared for. And I want them to know I will not accept any excuses. Yes, I understand what happens to you outside these walls is hard, but what I want to give you is to move you so you can better yourself.
Ms. Bailey’s comments reflect her awareness about her Black students’ lived realities and adversities outside of school, and how this awareness neither altered how she viewed the academic potential of her students nor decreased the high expectations she held for them. Ms. Bailey argued that her pedagogical stance involved symbolically protecting students from potential harm they encountered outside of schools and from the racialized harm of lowering expectations for students’ achievement and learning. In doing this, she identified her students as vulnerable children worthy of protection alongside pedagogically identifying them as students who are capable of academic success.
In the above quotes, Black educators demonstrated the affective characteristics of culturally relevant warm demanders (Irvine & Fraser, 1998) or educators “who provide a tough-minded, no-nonsense, structured, and disciplined classroom environment for kids whom society has psychologically and physically abandoned” (Irvine & Fraser, 1998, p. 56). Moreover, their remarks reflect the collective racialized consciousness many Black educators have toward the systemic conditions of their students’ lives and the kinds of racialized harm they encounter or are likely to encounter if not protected. Like Ms. Baily above, across interviews educators articulated how they utilized their interactions with Black students to symbolically nurture and protect them from the racialized harm and bigotry of societal conditions and related experiences in schools.
Creating “Safe” School Environments
Harkening back to the comments by the administrator at Porter who suggests that familial school environments can be symbolically protective for Black students, Black students and educators remarked that such relationality and welcoming climate at a school can provide Black students with a physical sense of safety. One middle school student at NPMS described how her sense of safety was linked to her school’s climate and community. She shared,
I like this kinda family relationship that we have [at the school] . . . we all know each other. We all somewhat get along together. We all know about each other. And it’s like family here and you feel safe. You don’t have to worry about fighting. It’s different from my last school.
This student contended that for her the familial type of relationship in the school helped her feel safe and known, and that she knew everyone else as well. She also suggested that this family relationship at her current school created a kind of physical safety for her that, unlike at her past school, meant that she did not have to “worry about fighting” on a day-to-day basis. The importance of this sense of safety, especially from potentially violent situations like fights within school, cannot be understated for any student, much less for those students who may have been or are currently exposed to violence at school or elsewhere in their lives.
Due to targeted housing policies that create and sustain economic and racial segregation in Black neighborhoods across the country and specifically within Oakland (Rothstein, 2017), the neighborhoods surrounding the focal school sites, particularly the elementary and middle schools, experienced high rates of poverty and violence. Students were aware of these conditions and spoke about how these conditions made them feel, including how they affected their feelings about physical safety when they were at their schools. In a focus group at Porter, young students contrasted their experience with violence in the neighborhoods around their school with the environment inside the school. One second grader shared,
I don’t feel safe outside because there’s a lot of shooting . . . inside I feel safe because it’s a big building and we can go anywhere. We could run up the stairs because there’s a lot of space and we can go all the way over there [to hide] if it’s [people shooting] over here.
Other students expressed their fears about walking home or playing outside because of gun violence in the neighborhood around the school. Students, their parents, and the educators at the focal schools were all keenly aware of the violence in the neighborhoods around their schools and had concerns about students’ physical safety based on a school’s location. Without criminalizing or pathologizing communities or people, the Black educators in this study explained the daily realities for some of their students and how they as educators sought to offer Black students a sense of physical and symbolic safety and a departure from the harm they may encounter given the by-products of systemic racialized inequalities such as poverty and violence.
The focal educators argued that one way to offer Black students a physical and symbolic sense of safety involved maintaining a clean and “orderly” school environment that would serve as an “oasis” or safety net for students and avoided reproducing—visually or otherwise—the racialized harm that some may experience because of systemic poverty and violence in the surrounding neighborhood.8 Black educators suggested that aesthetic and environmental features, such as a school building and grounds being clean and orderly, would allow students to feel cared for and physically safe once at school in ways that might reduce the children’s stress levels and the racialized harm they experienced by living in underresourced communities. Expressing this view, one administrator at NPMS argued,
If the kids come to a place that’s clean, that they feel like, “Alright I like this now ‘cuz it’s safe” . . . then it gives them a sense to come, but it also makes them feel like they can relax . . . ’cause I don’t know where they’re coming from, we don’t know the hassle. . . . If at least they can come and breathe deep and be at peace for a good six to eight hours, then we’re helping them out. . . . To me that gives an umbrella, a bubble of security around the kids. It gives them a place where they can take out some of the nonsense, some of the things that stress their life and more focus [sic] on getting better academically.
Like other educators across our sample, this administrator affirmed that a well-maintained school can serve as a form of care and protection because it allowed students to feel cared for and to “be at peace.” While at school, students could feel a “bubble of security” around them where concerns about their physical safety were lessened and allowed them to instead focus on being children and on their academics. This positioning of Black children as in need of a place of “peace” and that honors Black childhood recognizes them as inherently capable and willing to engage in school and in learning but potentially in need of a protective space in which they can experience psychological safety and “relax” enough to focus on their academics. This framing provides a stark counternarrative to discourses about Black students and their families as unable, unwilling, or disinterested in engaging or succeeding in school to instead acknowledge the systemic realities they may encounter inside and outside of school.
The sense of physical and symbolic safety discussed in this section does not mean that Black educators could and can always protect Black children from physical and related forms of harm outside of schools, although there were incidences when this did occur. However, going to a place where Black children felt physically safe and likewise experienced less psychological and emotional trauma or harm was itself a form of protection from the racialized harm inflicted by systemic violence and poverty.
Unconventional Structures to Meet Students’ Needs
In talking about developing Black children’s sense of physical and symbolic safety, the focal Black educators in this study articulated the importance of Black students feeling not only protected but also deserving and worthy of protection. As discussed previously, the Black educators in our study attended to their Black students in this way interpersonally and through how they maintained the school environment. Black educators also protected Black children by employing nonconventional structures or programs that affected students’ physical, socioemotional, and academic well-being. The data suggest that educators viewed students’ physical, socioemotional, and academic well-being as tightly linked together, and they sought to support students in all of these domains. For example, at MWA, a food pantry regularly distributed food to students and families. MWA, like other schools in our study, had a health clinic with full-time staff for students and their families, offering dental, vision, mental health, and medical services as part of its full-service community school (FSCS) model9 (see McKinney de Royston & Madkins, 2019, for a review of FSCSs in our study) that operated in collaboration with other service-oriented agencies.
Another way that educators acknowledged students as in being need of protection and tried to support their feeling worthy of being protected was through after-school and extracurricular programming designed to meet students’ needs. Most of our focal schools offered elective courses or after-school programs focused on students’ racialized and gendered experiences, such as the Manhood Development Program (MDP). MDP was initially developed for African American male students in Grades 6 to 12 and was later extended into several elementary schools. MDP has been effective for supporting African American male students’ academic performance, engagement, and navigation of schools.
The MDP program sought to position students as worthy and in need of protection and as academically capable. This also occurred at schools that did not have MDP, albeit through other means of bolstering student academic success. For instance, at MWA one such structure was the large whiteboard in the front office that listed the homework assignments each teacher assigned for the day. This homework board informed students and families about the day’s assignments and kept them in the loop if they were absent or missed a class period. Rather than penalizing students and families for missing something, MWA created a structure that facilitated students’ and families’ ongoing awareness and engagement with the academic expectations of individual teachers and classes. In addition to long-standing school offerings (e.g., tutorial support, arts and crafts), MWA hosted an after-school program, The Genius Hour, where students engaged in learning tasks based on their interests and were continually positioned as experts and geniuses.
At NPMS, another academically focused protective structure was the annual science fair. The entire student body was required to participate in the fair, and the science and engineering teachers focused a considerable amount of instructional time on preparing students to develop the content of their presentation and presentation skills. In class periods leading up to the science fair, students shared their ideas, rehearsed their science fair presentations in small groups, and participated in mock question-and-answer sessions. During this time, students received targeted feedback from their instructors and peers verbally and in written form. By allowing students to engage in mock science fair presentations and offering feedback, teachers at NPMS helped students improve their presentations, facilitated the development of students’ academic identities through positive positioning of them as scientists and constructors of knowledge, and modeled how scientists share their findings (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019).
The science fair at NPMS was more than an academic event. NPMS educators specifically designed it to attend to the multiple needs of their Black students and families. To encourage families to attend, it was held in the evening and began with a free, buffet-style dinner. The list of invited judges—almost all of whom identified as Black—included individuals from local STEM-focused nonprofit organizations, community members, and a member of our research team (the second author) to provide students with role models from minoritized communities (Felder Sumter, 2016). Students were required to have at least one adult in their lives (e.g., family member, after-school personnel, neighbor) serve as a judge for their projects; this score was factored into the student’s final science fair project grade. The science fair included performances by the school band, science activities for young children, and a step show (a form of African American dance; see Malone, 1996) from the feeder elementary schools, the NPMS step team, and members of local chapters of traditionally Black fraternities and sororities. Representatives from the NPMS Family Resource Center, medical and mental health services providers, and other community-based organizations had vendor tables offering families information about free, local services; the school’s food pantry hours and location; and summer programs. Although it is increasingly common for school personnel or science fair organizers to invite community members and professionals to serve as science fair judges (Austin Regional Science Festival, 2019; Hunt, 2016), the NPMS format was atypical of most school science fairs because it was about recognizing students and their families as willing and capable partners in the intellectual life of the school and offering supports for their physical and mental well-being. These school-level structures served as a source of protection for Black students.
Alternative Disciplinary Views and Practices as Protection
In the previous section, we explored interpersonal-level supports and institutional-level structures and supports that school sites implemented to simultaneously frame Black students as worthy of protection and as academically capable. We now explore how these same schools reconceptualized discipline and enacted alternative disciplinary practices in an effort to protect their students from racialized harm. An extensive body of literature has captured how Black students continue to be disproportionately and unfairly disciplined in comparison to white and Asian students (Ferguson, 2000; Gregory et al., 2010; E. W. Morris, 2007; Wallace et al., 2008). Given their understandings of these students’ plight, many Black teachers were insistent upon not viewing their Black students as in need of discipline; instead, they often utilized other strategies when handling student behavioral issues.
Ms. Johnson, a teacher at Bay Prep High School, reflected this alternative view and enactment of discipline. She stated,
When a student gets in trouble, it’s a different type of conversation, it’s not, “We’re so disappointed, I hate that I have to suspend you but . . .,” It’s like, “What are you thinking? This hurts me when I have to do this. It hurt me to see what you did.” . . . and for them to hear someone say—because that’s kind of a positive-negative—“I’m affected by what you did, even though it was negative. I believe in you” . . . It still screams, “I believe in you.”It makes a difference [emphasis added].
Here, Ms. Johnson acknowledges students’ racialized realities and illustrates a perspective that attends to Black students as in need of protection, not discipline. Saying, “I believe in you,” to a student reflects Ms. Johnson’s attempts to respond to the student’s actions and acknowledge the student’s humanity as not being limited to those actions.
Parents also discussed the importance of disciplinary practices and how alternative discipline practice reflected educators’ conscious protection of Black students. Michelle, a parent who had children enrolled at NPMS during two different administrations, offered a comparative perspective. When asked to compare her “current experiences as a parent” to her experiences when her older daughter attended NPMS, Michelle stated the following:
I did like the old principal; she did seem to care and make changes. . . . but the dynamic of the school totally changed when they got Mr. Simpson and those guys up in here. They start caring more for children, and when I say carin’, I think the other principal cared, but she did not have the staff to help her care [emphasis added]. They were interested in suspending them and getting the bad person out of here instead of seeing what’s going on with this kid. I think that Mr. Coles and Mr. Simpson look more into the person and figure out if they have a program that can help a child succeed. They want everyone to succeed.
Michelle described a new trend in the current school culture with respect to discipline: where Black children were viewed as in need of protection from a disciplinary system. Mr. Simpson and Mr. Coles, the new administrators, did not suspend or give punitive treatments to their Black students as an immediate response. Instead, they acknowledged the student’s humanity and attempted to identify additional resources and services the student might need. Michelle argued that under the new administration, no student was expendable and that the school offered programs attending to students’ needs and academic success. And while both administrations cared for students, she argued that Mr. Simpson and Mr. Coles had a team of educators who developed and implemented structures grounded in care, and aimed at protecting students.
An administrator at MWA, Dr. Thomas, embodied how Black educators troubled the practices around discipline in caring and protective ways. She could easily be read as a staunch disciplinarian given her no-nonsense demeanor and firm tone, yet students provided a more balanced perspective of her. They shared that Dr. Thomas was a “she don’t play that” type of principal but at the same time referred to her as a “softy” in a focus group interview. This sentiment especially came through when the group of students discussed how Dr. Thomas interacted with them in her office after they had gotten into trouble. When going to the principal’s office, the students found they were not met by the rigid disciplinarian they expected but instead encountered a caring and protective educator who valued students’ perspectives and employed disciplinary restraint. According to students, Dr. Thomas resisted relying on the dominant disciplinary practices imposed upon Black students (e.g., multiple days of in- or out-of-school suspension) and took intentional measures to address student behavior issues in ways that allowed them to still feel valued as students. During a focus group, three of seven Black male middle school students interviewed shared the following,
Student 1:
Yeah, she’ll be like, “Stop running in the hallways!” or if she knows your name, she’ll say your name till you stop running. And if you’re wandering around the hallways she’ll tell you to go to class.
Student 2:
She can be loving too cause I was in the office last year getting suspended and I went to her office and she wasn’t as hard as you’d think. Like she wasn’t real, real, real tough. She a softy a little bit. And she explained what she was going to do, why she was going to do it and then I was supposed to get a five-day suspension but I only got one [day]. But she give you [a chance] though [sic].
Student 3:
I would like to add . . . she can be [soft] sometimes . . . it depends on what side you get her on . . . when she call your name on the intercom (sic), like when I got in trouble, and I went in there . . . she gives you a chance. Like just before you get sent home, she ask you multiple times [emphasis added], “Do you have a justification of why you did this?”Multiple times [emphasis added]—and if you have one she let up [sic].
Dr. Thomas, like many of the other teachers in this study, resisted traditional disciplinary responses. While the principal’s office can often be read as the punishing room—particularly for Black students—Dr. Thomas made it a point to use that space as a place to lighten up her typical demeanor as a warm demander (Irvine & Fraser, 1998) that characterized her interactions with students on the school grounds. She allowed her office and one-on-one encounters with students in challenging situations to be a humanizing experience as opposed to a punitive one. The acts of protection these Black educators enacted were reflective of an awareness of not only the unfair disciplinary practices surrounding Black children in schools but also the empathy they have for their students because of the racialized harm students encounter outside of schools.
Similarly, two parents reflected on how Black educators at Porter Elementary School employed care and protection during the disciplinary encounters they observed between students they referred to as “bad, really bad”10 and administrators. The parents, Rochelle and Stephanie, shared that the level of patience and care these educators demonstrated with students was reminiscent of what one experiences from a parent. When to describe teachers and administrators’ relationships with students, Rochelle and Stephanie said,
Rochelle:
I think just caring. Like, even just Ms. Mustafa, even sometimes with the bad, really bad students where we’re just like, “Whoa!” . . . you’d never know in the way that she treated them that this was like a really, you know, troubled kid ‘cause she speaks to them like she does everyone else. She’s still kind to them, they still participate.
Stephanie:
Gives them chances and stuff and like all of that.
Rochelle:
So, she’s just kind to them.
Interviewer:
Kind and caring, okay.
Rochelle:
But also stern.
Stephanie:
I was gonna say that I love how they say, “These are my babies.”
Rochelle:
Our babies!
Stephanie:
I love when they say that cause it’s like he [an administrator] really loves these kids.
Interviewer:
Yeah, he does.
Stephanie:
And that’s great!
These parents took comfort in the teachers identifying with the students as if they were their own children. The school leaders and teachers were invested in the students, and when disciplinary infractions occurred, they handled it in ways that did not compromise the students’ dignity. The educators in our study viewed Black students as in need of forms of protection that did not negate the real issues that may be affecting their behavior, academic performance, and emotions but held them accountable to high expectations and to having a degree of personal agency.
Positive Positioning as a Form of Protection
Across our classroom observations, we documented how many Black educators, through their interactions with Black students, were intentional about wielding care as a form of protection. In the following excerpt from an observation in a sixth-grade classroom at MWA, Ms. Marshall interacts with one of her students, Chicha, who was having some behavioral challenges. Ms. Marshall engages with Chicha in an affirming manner and demands her engagement in class, avoiding positioning her as a problem student or viewing her with a deficit orientation:
Fifth period starts at 1:30 p.m. When the students come in they begin Sustained Silent Reading11 (SSR). While most of the students are at their desks reading, others have gone over to the bookshelf to get reading material. One little girl lingers. She’s a small, dark-brown skinned girl with one big puffy ponytail on top. I noticed this student following Ms. Marshall around on another day as she did rounds to the other middle school classrooms. It appeared as though this young girl had gotten in trouble and Ms. Marshall made her shadow her until she got herself together to go back to class. The dynamic between the two of them did not seem tense even though the student seemed upset, but her anger didn’t seem to be directly at the teacher, whom she was trailing behind. Ms. Marshall says to her, “Come on baby girl, pick a book so you can get to reading.” The student says, “Okay,” unaffected by Ms. Marshall’s comment, and keeps looking through the books. Ms. Marshall then says, “Chicha, don’t pick up another book.” Chicha can tell Ms. Marshall meant business, because she takes the book she currently had in her hand and made her way over to her seat. Ms. Marshall smiles at her as she skips over to her seat, tracing her with her eyes, to let her know she’s watching.All the students are reading. Some are sitting or lying on the floor. It’s pretty quiet and you can hear pages turning, some students shuffling their feet or readjusting their chairs. Occasionally students will talk to one another at a whisper, but it isn’t long before they’re met with a look of warning or their names being called just above a whisper. Ms. Marshall seems to be relaxed at handling the class. When SSR is over students pull out their [Google] Chromebooks® and begin working on their narratives. As they’re doing this, Ms. Marshall is pulling up different students’ documents on the projector through Google Docs and checking their progress and making comments as she goes in and out of different students documents online. “Ok girl, I see you, ahead of the middle column,” she said looking over at a young Latina student, noting her progress on her narrative. They exchange smiles, and some students giggle at Ms. Marshall’s use of casual/hip language with their classmate.As the students are working, Ms. Marshall instructs them to go back to the beginning of their narratives. Chicha is not paying attention, or at least she isn’t making eye contact, “tracking the speaker,” which Ms. Marshall requires of all the students. She affectionately, but firmly states, “Lil Chocolate . . . Lil Chocolate,” to get her attention. Chicha then gets it, and begins watching Ms. Marshall. “Thank You,” she says with a playful smile. . . . After reading through Chicha’s story, Ms. Marshall comments on the details she gives in her opening and says, “I’m witchu boo!” Moving on to the next student she says, “Alright thanks, Chocolate.”She then goes to Eduardo, the student she referred to as Paw Paw earlier, and begins reading his narrative. “My dad, my brother, and I . . .” She then turns to the class with a smile, “Who are the characters?! Look at him, setting up the context.” She then highlights another line, “The living room felt cold and dismal” . . . She comments, “Look at them words,” as a means of noting his use of vivid language. Chicha is trying to get Ms. Marshall’s attention. Ms. Marshall gives her a look of suspicion. “Ms. Marshall, come here, girl,” she says with a smile on her face. Ms. Marshall goes over and the student asks her for help with something about her story (November 13, 2014; researcher’s inferences italicized).
This excerpt illustrates several key aspects of Ms. Marshall’s interactions with students: the affectionate naming of students (e.g., Chocolate, Paw Paw, boo), how she reframed encounters that could have become disciplinary moments in ways that demonstrate her high expectations but give students opportunities to meet those expectations, and the affirming of student success and effort. Ms. Marshall’s discourse with students demonstrates an investment in their identities on a personal level that connects them to the instructional approach. The way in which students, especially Chicha, respond to Ms. Marshall’s comments and seek her out for support demonstrate how students both positively assess and feel safe to participate in this relationship.
Ms. Johnson, at Bay Prep, voiced her perspective on her work as an educator:
And I could not do this if I didn’t love them. I call them my sweeties, I actually use those terms. . . And because I think if you start using other terms, then you’re gonna start thinking of them in those other maybe negative terms, and that’s not who they are. . . . [My] thing to them is always, heads up. Heads up. I’m not saying to them, “Have a nice weekend!” That might come out as a second but my first one is heads up . . . because when they go out there, you know there’s no protection [emphasis added] and I would tell them, “I’m a teacher, I’m gonna always protect you,” to be able to endure some of the adversities you’ll face outside of this classroom.
Ms. Johnson highlighted the need to call her high schoolers by terms of endearment, like “sweetie.” She did so in order to recruit her Black students back into their childhoods, thus protecting students from (or undoing) the damage of negative stereotypes they face daily.
Discussion
This article examines how Black educators articulate and enact a need to protect Black students from racialized harm. Continuing the legacy of those that precede them (e.g., Dixson, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Walker, 2009a), many of today’s Black educators see education as a vehicle for racial liberation and justice and their role as educators as inherently political because of the racialized discourses and practices that stretch into and beyond schools (Ginwright, 2010; Roberts, 2010). These contemporary educators work alongside and on behalf of Black children because they recognize the racialized harm that happens in and out of schools as well as that these children may not manage these experiences—be they singular instances or repeated acts of subtle or overt racism—in ways that are privileged within schools.
As our analyses demonstrate, these Black educators’ political clarity—that is, their enactment of a sociopolitical consciousness (Beauboeuf-LaFontant, 1999; Freire, 1970/2005; Ladson-Billings, 1995)—about the racialized realities of Black children’s lives reflects their awareness that Black children navigate racialized harm, that is, symbolic and physical violence of biases and stereotypes, within schools just as they do in U.S. society writ large. Our analyses focus on Black educators, in part, because within our sample it was these educators who articulated their political clarity and were the most prevalent protectors of Black students. The racialized harm they reference included institutionalized racism as well as interpersonal acts of racialized harm such as daily racial microaggressions (i.e., acts of racism that are no less harmful despite their lack of intentionality or visibility to the perpetuator (Huber & Solórzano, 2015)). This includes some teachers holding a color-evasive lens that erases Black children’s lived experiences to Black children being stereotyped or institutionally ignored or disregarded. A lack of political clarity about the racialized realities of Black children further exacerbates the complex trauma Black children may experience and the types of coping, oppositional strategies, or resistant attitudes and behavior they may adopt in response (Dumas, 2014; E. W. Morris, 2007; Wun, 2014).
By contrast, the Black educators illustrated in this study held a nuanced and evolving clarity about how race and racism function egregiously and subtly, in society and in schools. They enacted this political clarity in many ways, from reframing students’ actions as opportunities to engage rather than punish to calling out the ways that Black children are adultified (Ferguson, 2000), criminalized, and inducted into the school-to-prison nexus (Meiners, 2011; Stovall, 2016). Their constant reference to their students as “our babies” was a verbal declaration of their kindred investment in Black children’s well-being and success, in Black childhood, and in a positioning of Black children as children and as worthy learners in need of protection. These educators repeatedly displayed a praxis that consistently reframed Black students as children who are made vulnerable by the racialized conditions of society, rather than by the child’s moral, pathological, or intellectual inadequacies.
We argue that these Black educators’ positioning of Black students as in need and worthy of protection is extraordinary. It is extraordinary not because these educators are superhuman, “magical,” or “uniquely qualified” (Baldridge, 2017; Bristol & Mentor, 2018, p. 231) but because the ways they think about and care for Black children’s lives is uncommon, even in a society in which Black-child-life is visibly threatened. We do not suggest that all Black educators everywhere articulate a race-conscious awareness around protection or enact mechanisms of protection, nor that they are the only ones to do so. Caring for and protecting each and every child should necessarily be the work of every educator, particularly those aiming to be culturally and politically relevant. It also has to be done by non-Black teachers who are the majority of teachers in most schools (Ingersoll et al., 2018). Likewise, we do not essentialize Black educators as monolithically benign toward Black students—sadly, like other educators they can and do perpetuate racialized harm against Black children.
This research does suggest that teaching, as an personal endeavor and a profession, requires a racialized and politicized awareness that must be cultivated in teacher education programs and as teachers grow in their practice as professionals. It is imperative that teacher educators support preservice and in-service teachers to continually develop, refine, and enact an asset-based political clarity about their students and the communities and families they represent. This can be fostered by teachers sharing and critically reflecting on their own and their students’ experiences and their teaching practices in relation to their social and political views and interests (Diemer & Li, 2011; Jackson & Knight-Manuel, 2019; Kirkland, 2014; Ngo et al., 2017; Varghese & Snyder, 2018; Watts & Hipolito-Delgado, 2015).
The voices of Black educators featured here also challenges us, as educational researchers and educators, to consider what the term safe means, and when and which spaces are considered safe and for whom? The Black educators in our study sought to create safe spaces in schools because they perceived there to be generally a lack of safety in the spaces Black children moved through. This assumes that Black students felt unsafe in these other spaces, and that schools have the potential to be constructed as spaces in which Black students could possibly feel safe. A lingering question is what current Black educators and others mean by “safe” or “humanizing” spaces and if their definitions and enactments align with those of Black children. Safe or humanizing for whom, in what way, toward what ends? Is safety simply the lack of dehumanizing environments or experiences or something else? What types of protection might Black children be interested in or what kinds of shifts in schooling are they asking for? If children answer these questions, are we willing and able—as a society, as adults, as educators—to create those kinds of educational institutions and realities? Further research can help us understand what Black children identify as safe and if this is a role schools can and should play.
A notable tension in our data warranting further discussion is how Black students’ need for protection is discussed in relation to the surrounding neighborhoods of the schools. This is a complicated conversation because it is easy to locate violence and trauma within individual acts (i.e., a shooting, violence in the home) or persons rather than consider how these acts are systematically orchestrated by the aggressive and institutionalized neglect and disenfranchisement minoritized communities continue to experience (Rothstein, 2017; Shapiro, 2017). Some of the Black educators in this study attended to this, though their discourse at times centered on the micro level of violence and harm. We must trouble this discourse, not as an indictment of those who call our attention to micro-level issues but as an acknowledgment of the varied systemic and structural forms of racialized harm Black children face. We must resist convenient analyses that pathologize Black children, parents, and communities yet fail to implicate structures designed to disenfranchise and dehumanize them.
At the heart of these questions is perhaps an even more fundamental one for educators and researchers: What should be the role of schools in contemporary society? How do we respond to the systemic vulnerability of Black children given the physical and psychological violence anti-Blackness cultivates in schools? Grappling with these questions requires us to consider whether how we organize schools, curricula, assessments, discipline, in-school services, and classrooms, meets our own epistemic criteria for education, pedagogy, and humanity. In an era when public education, as a human right and a social good, is deeply challenged, these questions are vital. Notably, our findings demonstrate that such questions are intrinsic to and nonnegotiable for the everyday consciousness and practices of many Black educators.
ORCID iD
Tia C. Madkins https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2555-9025
Footnotes
Supplemental material is available for this article in the online version of the journal.
1 Like many Black scholars, in this article we capitalize the term “Black” but not “white” when referring to individuals, groups of people, or communities. Dumas (2016) explains, “In my work, I have decided to capitalize Black when referencing Black people, organizations, and cultural products. Here, Black is understood as a self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships” (p. 12–13). Likewise, the term white “is not capitalized in my work because it is nothing but a social construct, and does not describe a group with a set of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization and terror” (p. 12–13).
2 The term children is used throughout to avoid terms like youth that can obscure childhood. The term student is used only when referencing children in schools or when mirroring language used in cited text.
3 In this article, the term educator refers to all staff, instructional or otherwise, who support children within schools. The term teacher will be used to refer to instructional staff specifically.
4 Giroux & Penna (1979, p. 38) define the hidden curriculum as “those social processes in all sociopolitical institutions including the classroom which militate against the creation of a democratic, social education.”
5 The Oakland Unified School District asked for the city and district to be named in the research conducted on its reform initiatives during the period studied. Doing so creates challenges to maintaining the confidentiality and anonymity of specific participants, namely, educators who may be well-known community members and long-time residents.We have thus omitted highly identifiable information about the educators such as exact age, number of years of teaching experience, as well as their personal histories.
6 A sampling method where the researcher obtains names of potential participants through direct contact with community members via organizations, individuals, churches, or periodicals. This method was coined by Foster (1991) and has been taken up in educational research, most notably by Ladson-Billings (1995).
7 Michael Brown, an unarmed, Black teenager was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014 (see Kvetenadze, 2018; Powell, 2016).
8 This comment underscores the commitment to the safety of the physical environment but also potentially stereotypes the city and particular areas of the city in problematic ways.
9 FSCSs are increasingly popular in urban districts with the goal of better connecting local and school communities. FSCSs offer services on school campuses, like job training; mental health, medical, and dental services; food banks; and crisis intervention (Oakes et al., 2017; Sanders et al., 2018).
10 Since the interviewer did not probe for clarity of what the parent meant by “bad, really bad,” we cannot infer additional meaning.
11 During SSR, students read a book of their choice typically for 15 to 30 minutes, with the aim of improving students’ reading comprehension levels and literature appreciation.
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Biographies
Maxine McKinneyde Royston is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 210 Teacher Education Building, 225 N. Mills Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. Her research examines the pedagogical and interactional characteristics of learning environments, particularly as conceived by Black teachers and/or as experienced by Black students. Her work has examined how race, identity, and power shape the multidimensional and politicized nature of teaching and learning, and how learning environments operate as racialized learning spaces.
Tia C. Madkins is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and a faculty research affiliate with the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Drawing mainly upon qualitative methods, her research focuses on teacher learning processes and how STEM teachers develop and implement equity-focused teaching dispositions to transform learning environments for intersectionally minoritized students.
Jarvis R. Givens is an assistant professor of education and an affiliate faculty in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also the Suzanne Young Murray assistant professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He earned his PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and his first book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press. His research and teaching fall at the intersection of the history of education, African American history, and critical theories of race, power, and schooling.
Na’ilah Suad Nasir is the sixth President of the Spencer Foundation, Chicago, United states. Her research examines the racialized and cultural nature of learning and schooling, with a particular focus on the experiences of African American students in schools and communities. Her work has examined the organization of learning in cultural practices outside of school, the intersection of identity and learning, and equitable teaching in mathematics. She is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.
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